Are this season's most disappointing players just bad?

Or are they players who just had a down year and could make four great targets next season?

I've got Derek Van Riper on the line here to answer just that question here on the Rodewire Fantasy Baseball podcast.

Hello. Fantasy Baseball Podcast. Hello and welcome, everybody, to the Thursday edition of the Road to Wire Fantasy Baseball

podcast brought to you by chalkboard.

Eric Hulterman here, excited to be joined by Derek Van Riper of the Athletic.

Derek, exciting last few weeks here of the season.

I know you've got your brewers giving you quite a lot to follow in these final few weeks.

Are your fantasy teams coming down to the wire as well?

Are you pulling ahead in the one seed just like your Milwaukee Brewers?

I'm trying to. I feel like my week this week has overlapped their week. I'm glad the Brewers are done in Texas after getting swept there. I'm trying to hold a position at or near the top in a staff keeper league that became a league called Maki. So that's a 16-teen keeper league that has been going on for more than a decade. It'd be nice to win that one. Got a good battle going with a couple other people in that one. So we'll see. I think in other leagues, I'm kind of chasing second a lot. There's a kind of a runaway winner and mixed labor. Ryan Bloomfield is pretty much uncatchable at this point. So it's trying to take second there. Just getting to the top of the shelf that I'm in in each league is my goal. So it might be a lot of, you know, seconds, thirds, and fourths at the high end and a lot of mid-pack finishes for me and some time to look back and figure out what went wrong. But I think part of what went wrong is that I have a few of the guys we're going to talk about today on my teams. And that's not necessarily a good thing in 2025, but maybe it'll be a good

thing for 2026. Yeah, that is the big question today. We've got at least one player at

every position who was picked pretty early in the draft and returns negative value or low

single digit value. And we're going to try to figure out, are these guys just done for good?

Where they just completely mis-evaluated?

They never should have been in that part of the draft in the first place.

Or do we hope everybody else is off of them for next year so that we can get them at a discount?

We will get to those names soon.

But as always, want to start with some headlines,

which includes a few milestones here. How about one Soto reaching the 30-30 threshold? I talked about this a little bit with Ryan Boyer on Saturday's show. Since then, I think he's added

at least a couple more steals, something like eight in his last 11 games.

And Derek, the question I want to ask you here is, what the heck are we supposed to do about trying to figure out who's going to steal bases next year?

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